Tony noms are often an occasion for gloating at the Yale Rep, Long Wharf Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals and Hartford Stage—the regional theaters that often develop new works which evolve into Broadway hits, or encourage artists that later make it big in New York, or share in the same talent pool of actors and designers that Broadway draws from.
Around here, a Tony isn’t seen as the culmination of a career; it’s validation in one theater realm of fine work that’s been acknowledged in other theater realms already.
This year, it’s the undergrad Yale Theater Studies department which has reason to crow. Alex Timbers, a 2001 graduate of the university, is nominated for Best Book of a Musical for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which he also directed. Timbers had a fanatical following as a student director, which he built upon with his New York based Les Freres Corbusiers company and now much-hyped shows like Bloody Bloody and the recent Pee Wee Herman Show revival (which Timbers directed).
There are plenty of opportunities for Connecticut theatergoers to say “I saw that person once in…” For instance;
Vanessa Redgrave (nominated for Driving Miss Daisy) did a politically charged playreading at Long Wharf this year.
Brian Bedford (director of The Importance of Being Earnest, but nominated for playing Lady Bracknell in it) brought his one-man Shakespeare show to the Long Wharf many years ago.
John Benjamin Hickey was a regional theater stalwart who did Valued Friends at Long Wharf in 1990 and also apparently worked at Yale Rep in something sometime.
John Kander & Fred Ebb had a regional workshop of their musical version of The Skin of Our Teeth at Westport Country Playhouse three years ago, when their The Scottsboro Boys (nominated for Best Musical and 11 other awards) was already being developed.
David Yazbek (nominated for Best Original Score of a Musical for doing both the music & lyrics for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) once had a rock band that sounded a lot like XTC (high praise) which played at Toad’s Place in New Haven.
Al Pacino has done stage work at the Long Wharf several times, most recently in Hughie in the mid-‘90s.
Larry Kramer nearly killed himself at Yale because he felt unloved and misunderstood as a gay men in the 1950s; his The Normal Heart, nominated for Best Revival of a Play, and his million-dollar gift to Yale to found a center for gay studies in 2001, helped demystify and celebrate gay culture for everybody.
Mark Rylance spent seven years of his childhood in Connecticut, from the ages of 2 to 9.
Scratch a Broadway show, and somebody in Connecticut has a tangential thread to pull.
I’ll keep adding to this list as things occur to me. Feel free to email me your own “I remember them in…”s to chris@scribblers.us, or just comment below.